Sharpshooters
by Hawki
Summary: Oneshot: Trooper, sharpshooter, sniper. It didn't matter to her. She was a soldier either way.


**Sharpshooters**

"Look on my works, ye mighty and despair."

"What?"

" _Ozymandias_. Percy Shelly. It's an English poem."

"You know I don't read English."

"Really? You never read a translation?"

"I had better things to do in my life."

Sergeant Ana Amari, Egyptian Army, 44th Infantry Brigade, decided that she couldn't disagree with that assessment. She didn't consider herself a patriot. She didn't shut her eyes to the fact that Egypt could be a hard place to live in at the best of times, and on a continent that had suffered the worst effects of climate change and civil strife, that people like Corporal Mohammed Askar weren't going to be exposed to every single piece of literature in the world.

"Of course," Mohammed continued, "I _was_ planning on living awhile longer."

"I think we all had that plan."

"Really? You enlisted didn't you?"

She glanced at him through her rifle's scope. "You really want to bring that up now?"

"No. Just didn't think that career army is a job that guarantees long life expectancy."

"Well, I'm a sergeant. My career encompasses shooting, and keeping little shits like you in line." She shot him a smile. "When I've got a star on a chevron, then you can talk to me about careers."

It was old banter. The type of banter that had voiced much louder and much longer, when they were part of a platoon, and not two individuals camped out in a bombed out building in Cairo. Far out enough to see the great pyramids, close enough in to see plenty of other buildings that had suffered a similar fate.

It amazed Ana that the pyramids had survived this long. They didn't hold any tactical value, but total war, by its nature, consumed everything. A human foe might have appreciated the worth of tearing out the cultural heart of a people. But the omnics weren't human. They'd moved out across the desert like locusts of myth, destroying anything that opposed them, and leaving behind anything that didn't. If this was indeed the apocalypse, then Allah was being pretty selective as to what got destroyed. So when Percy Shelly had come to mind, she hadn't been thinking of pyramids or sphinx. She'd been thinking of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, and a dozen other cities within Egypt alone, not to mention the entire world. Maybe in centuries gone, a traveller would gaze upon the works of Man. Maybe they could imagine the despair of that age, and feel despair themselves.

But for now, she was holed up in this building, her orders to observe, report, and if circumstances allowed it, eliminate the enemy. Do what the remnants of the Egyptian Army were doing – fighting tooth and nail throughout their country's capital, mirroring the actions of armies across Africa, and the world in general. Mirroring their desperation, and mirroring the fact they were losing.

"There's one down there."

She saw the tango quickly. An omnic. Standard model, standard rifle, standard everything, bar the fact that it was walking down the streets alone. Past tanks, past APCs, past bodies. Normal in every respect, bar the fact that it was alone.

"You going to take it out?"

"You know me so well." She lined up the robot through her scope. Range was 307 metres. Wind non-existent, humidity low, visibility impaired by the midday sun. Omnics had the advantage at noon and midnight, unhindered as they were by the need for water and sleep. Maybe that was why this particular enemy was happy to walk by its lonesome. Or maybe it knew what Ana knew. What everyone in Egypt knew – that Cairo was as good as lost, and guerrilla tactics weren't going to make a difference.

Her finger reached the trigger. For a moment, she recalled another conversation she'd had with Mohammed – why hadn't she been a sniper? She had the marksmanship and mental fortitude for it. Why wasn't she in a position where she had a spotter telling her what she needed to know, instead of a trooper whose best contribution was letting her know that an enemy happened to be in the street below?

The trigger was pulled back. She drew in her breath. She reflected that she didn't know. She was a good shot – the best shot in the world, by all accounts. And yet, it had never occurred to her that she'd be in a position to use those skills at all. Joining the army, NCO or otherwise, was a career, albeit a simple one. She'd been fine with that.

The trigger was released. A 10mm armour piercing round was released from the chamber of what was, for all intents and purposes, a miniaturized railgun. One of only a few available to the Egyptian Army. Too few. Omnics would go down with small arms fire well enough, but not soon enough. She'd seen that herself. Seen them shrug off rounds fired at point-blank range, and literally rip out the hearts of their enemies. So, on as much as seeing a machine be destroyed could allow, she took some pride in seeing that round tear through the torso of her target.

"Bullseye," she whispered.

"Bullseye?" Mohammed asked. "It's still moving."

It was. A chest shot was enough to incapacitate an omnic, not enough to outright destroy it.

"Why didn't you shoot the head?"

She kept her sights on the target, fighting the instinct to eject a non-existent shell casing.

"Training," she murmured.

She fired again, hitting the omnic's cranium. It shattered into a dozen pieces. Dead. If life could be said to be possessed by these machines at all.

"Body shots are usually best," she murmured. She leaned up against the wall of the level they were in, taking a sip from her hip flask. "Easier to hit the target, easier to incapacitate the target, makes it more likely that the enemy will spend time on retrieving the target."

"I know that," Mohammed said. He leant back and took a sip as well. "But they're not human."

"Like I said, training," she said. "Besides, I can live with using two shots to down the _kanith_ instead of one."

"Right." He raised in flask in mock toast. "To the glorious dead."

"To the dead." She took another sip. She almost took another before bottling the flask. She had far more bullets than water, she reflected. Her superiors had set her up well. Her kill count was nearly in the triple digits. But water, food…those were the things that were hard to come by. Hard to come by for a rapidly diminishing population.

"Y'know," Mohammed began, "they're saying that there's some kind of bigwig meeting in Geneva. Some kind of international task force."

"Bully for the Swiss." She returned her gaze to her scope. "Why should I care?"

"Well, y'know…best of the best, elite soldiers…bet you could apply for it."

"Right. Sure. And Horus is going to come down and fly me over there."

"Says the person wearing an udjat."

She withdrew her eye from the scope and looked at Mohammed. Glared at him. Glared at him with such intensity that he looked ready to wither on the spot. Glared at him before returning her gaze to the rifle.

"The gods," she said, "are either impotent, uncaring, or both. Or God."

"What does that have to do with Switzerland?"

"Everything." She kept looking down the scope. "Many gods, one world. And they've all failed us."

He didn't respond. And she didn't blame him.

Works made mighty had been laid to waste.

All that was left was despair.


End file.
